"shotgun house" meaning in All languages combined

See shotgun house on Wiktionary

Noun [English]

Forms: shotgun houses [plural]
Etymology: * New Orleans architectural historian Samuel Wilson, Jr. has suggested that the term alludes to the idea that if all the doors are opened, a shotgun blast fired into the house from the front doorway will fly cleanly to the other end and out at the back. * Folklorist John Michael Vlach has suggested a corruption of a Dahomey Fon area term "to-gun", meaning "place of assembly", brought to New Orleans by Afro-Haitian slaves. Head templates: {{en-noun}} shotgun house (plural shotgun houses)
  1. A narrow shack with a door at each end, common in the Southern United States from the end of the Civil War until the 1920s. Synonyms: shotgun, shotgun shack
    Sense id: en-shotgun_house-en-noun-z2B8rREZ Categories (other): English entries with incorrect language header

Inflected forms

Download JSON data for shotgun house meaning in All languages combined (1.4kB)

{
  "etymology_text": "* New Orleans architectural historian Samuel Wilson, Jr. has suggested that the term alludes to the idea that if all the doors are opened, a shotgun blast fired into the house from the front doorway will fly cleanly to the other end and out at the back.\n* Folklorist John Michael Vlach has suggested a corruption of a Dahomey Fon area term \"to-gun\", meaning \"place of assembly\", brought to New Orleans by Afro-Haitian slaves.",
  "forms": [
    {
      "form": "shotgun houses",
      "tags": [
        "plural"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "head_templates": [
    {
      "args": {},
      "expansion": "shotgun house (plural shotgun houses)",
      "name": "en-noun"
    }
  ],
  "lang": "English",
  "lang_code": "en",
  "pos": "noun",
  "senses": [
    {
      "categories": [
        {
          "kind": "other",
          "name": "English entries with incorrect language header",
          "parents": [
            "Entries with incorrect language header",
            "Entry maintenance"
          ],
          "source": "w"
        }
      ],
      "examples": [
        {
          "ref": "2019, Colson Whitehead, The Nickel Boys, Fleet, page 25",
          "text": "Dr. King’s words filled the front room of the shotgun house.",
          "type": "quotation"
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "A narrow shack with a door at each end, common in the Southern United States from the end of the Civil War until the 1920s."
      ],
      "id": "en-shotgun_house-en-noun-z2B8rREZ",
      "links": [
        [
          "narrow",
          "narrow"
        ],
        [
          "shack",
          "shack"
        ],
        [
          "door",
          "door"
        ],
        [
          "United States",
          "United States"
        ]
      ],
      "synonyms": [
        {
          "word": "shotgun"
        },
        {
          "word": "shotgun shack"
        }
      ]
    }
  ],
  "word": "shotgun house"
}
{
  "etymology_text": "* New Orleans architectural historian Samuel Wilson, Jr. has suggested that the term alludes to the idea that if all the doors are opened, a shotgun blast fired into the house from the front doorway will fly cleanly to the other end and out at the back.\n* Folklorist John Michael Vlach has suggested a corruption of a Dahomey Fon area term \"to-gun\", meaning \"place of assembly\", brought to New Orleans by Afro-Haitian slaves.",
  "forms": [
    {
      "form": "shotgun houses",
      "tags": [
        "plural"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "head_templates": [
    {
      "args": {},
      "expansion": "shotgun house (plural shotgun houses)",
      "name": "en-noun"
    }
  ],
  "lang": "English",
  "lang_code": "en",
  "pos": "noun",
  "senses": [
    {
      "categories": [
        "English countable nouns",
        "English entries with incorrect language header",
        "English lemmas",
        "English multiword terms",
        "English nouns",
        "English terms with quotations"
      ],
      "examples": [
        {
          "ref": "2019, Colson Whitehead, The Nickel Boys, Fleet, page 25",
          "text": "Dr. King’s words filled the front room of the shotgun house.",
          "type": "quotation"
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "A narrow shack with a door at each end, common in the Southern United States from the end of the Civil War until the 1920s."
      ],
      "links": [
        [
          "narrow",
          "narrow"
        ],
        [
          "shack",
          "shack"
        ],
        [
          "door",
          "door"
        ],
        [
          "United States",
          "United States"
        ]
      ],
      "synonyms": [
        {
          "word": "shotgun"
        },
        {
          "word": "shotgun shack"
        }
      ]
    }
  ],
  "word": "shotgun house"
}

This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable All languages combined dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-05-06 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-05-02 using wiktextract (f4fd8c9 and c9440ce). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.

If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.